The Random Ramblings Of A Chimp In Tech

Those nice guys over at the Mozilla Foundation have decided to help all Firefox users to maintain an enhanced level of privacy with a new setting that allow the user to switch on an option to block all the tracking cookies and aggregators that follow us around the web and in many cases can actually be used to personally identify us.

The new feature is in version 36 onward, however it won’t be in the main user interface until version 39, so in the meantime you will have to access it from the about:config option using the procedure below.

Load up Firefox and enter ‘about:config‘ in the address bar where you normally enter website addresses, and press ‘Enter‘.

The main window will now show a whole host of options in alphabetical order, scroll down to the option marked ‘privacy.trackingprotection.enabled‘, by default its value will be set to ‘false‘, which means that protection is not enabled.

To toggle, double click the line to change its value to ‘true‘, enabling tracking protection.

To disable, simply double click again to change its value to ‘false‘

Note: Enabling this option doesn’t prevent advertising appearing on a web page, it just block the aggregate trackers.

Once you have enabled this option, and visit a site that is engaging in user tracking activities you will see a shield like icon just to left of the address bar.

Note: In tests, many users are reporting speed increases of upto 20% when activating the tracking protection option which is an indication of how much tracking is being done on our everyday web surfing.

Important Note – This option should not be confused with the ‘Tell sites that I Do not want to be tracked’ option in the privacy settings – The ‘Do Not Track’ option is only a request to a website to not track the user, the visited web site can choose to ignore the DNT signal if they so desire, and many do.

This new feature in Firefox is the integration of a tracking blocking product by a company called Disconnect. This company has a comprehensive database of current tracking technologies and services and actively block them from the browser.

This post is a chimpytech production – please visit our website at www.chimpytech.com for great technology tutorials.